The Hero's Cross
by Darth Noot
Summary: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords protagonist Astred Kell struggles to regain her honor, her humanity, and her identity after being exiled from the Jedi Order.


The Star Wars universe and all characters therein belong to George Lucas, LucasArts, Bioware and Obsidian Entertainment.

The Hero's Cross

She had been knocking down Ralqual's victims in the pit for six months when I was moved to the room across from hers. Being the third and top floor of the compound, it was hot. Sure, the whole slave compound was open-air, but there was nothing refreshing about the New Morjanssik breeze. The whole ramshackle city lay in a dry basin below sea level; though if there were an honest-to-gods sea anywhere on the planet Lok, nobody knew where it was.

I shouldered open the door when the sensors failed to notice me. It was an interior room, so there was no slot-window to remind me just how completely the compound teetered on the fringes of New Morjanssik. It was unusual for a slave like me to live so far from the inner city squalor. Fringe compounds housed Ralqual's pit fighters most of the time, as no full citizen wanted a gladiator for a neighbor. But Ralqual put too many of them too close together, which is why the former occupant of this room was dead.

I edged sideways through the entryway. When I got into the room itself, I noticed a clean-looking straw pallet pushed against the far corner. I set down my bags and tried out the pallet, easing down onto it slowly. It didn't feel used – good. I didn't want to sleep on a pallet that a corpse lay on the night before. I lied down on my back and wiped sweat off my face. The low ceiling was splashed with something brown and ancient-looking. I tried not to guess what it was.

I must have dozed off because I sat bolt upright to the sound of arguing in the hallway. Rubbing my eyes, I saw that I had stupidly left the door wide open. I got up and went to close it. On my way there, I took a hydrospanner out of my bag; might as well fix the sensors while I was at it.

The sound of Ralqual's incomprehensible gargling filtered down the corridor. A woman's voice responded: "If you don't like short fights, don't match me up with Mandalorians."

Ralqual gargled something back. I didn't have to speak Quarrenese to know that he was angry.

"That has nothing to do with it, Ralqual." The woman's voice remained level.

Ralqual replied, and then he must have gone away. I heard footfalls approaching and I took care to stay in the cramped entryway of my room. There was no hurry on the sensors, after all. It was just a door.

The footsteps continued down the hall until they reached my open door. The woman stopped; it must have been her, then. I heard the annoying, unoiled squeak of her door sliding open. I let my breath out in a sigh; she hadn't noticed me. I powered up my hydrospanner.

"Hello?" came the woman's voice.

I winced.

She took a step toward my room. Standing in the doorway, her eyes settled on me. They were a clear, light gray. There was something blue or green about them, I couldn't tell which. Her curly, flame-red hair was pinned up in an almost glowing mass atop her head.

"Hi," I said. "I'm Chacko. A mechanic."

"My name is Astred," she said, extending her hand. I looked down at it, not sure whether I was really supposed take it. The hand wore a black glove with a plated backing. It matched her full-body durasteel suit, which was more scratched and banged up than the oldest pilot droids I'd worked on. "Your new neighbor," she said.

I took the hand. Her grip bit into my metacarpals. "It's good to meet you," I said.

"So you're a mechanic, eh?" she asked. "Droids, speeders, what?"

I nodded. "Just droids."

"So I guess I have you to thank for the bartenders," Astred said.

I looked at her. She was smirking. Then I realized she had made a joke. I laughed. She laughed too, and her eyes twinkled when she did. Her face looked teenaged, maybe twenty, no more than twenty-four – the normal age bracket for gladiators – but her laughter sounded like it belonged to an older body.

"Do you have any of your droids here with you?" she asked. Most people wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to look over my shoulder into my room as they asked questions like this, but strangely, she kept her eyes on my face.

"No," I said. "They're all at my garage downtown. If you want to come and see them, you'd be more than welcome anytime." Why would a gladiator want to spend her time off looking at droids? Would she think an old guy was hitting on her?

Astred handed me her personal datapad. "I will be sure to visit the next time I'm downtown. Just give me the coords."

I did, and handed it back to her.

"You have a question for me?" she asked. Was I that obvious?

I glanced down, pointing back into my room without meaning to. "Uh, yes," I said. I had to clear my throat. "Is it true that you killed the slave who lived here before me?"

The pale gray-green, gray-blue eyes regarded me. "Yes, Chacko." One of those stuffy, rank breezes wafted through the hall, blowing noisily. "He wasn't family to you, was he?"

"No, no. I never met him," I replied. From what I'd heard, he wasn't the most civilized gladiator in New Morjanssik. And contrary to everything I had heard about Astred – and seen myself, though I avoided the pits – this woman didn't seem like a murderer.

She smiled. It was offworldishly bright. "It's getting late, and I have a match tomorrow." Just a match, as though it didn't mean she would be stepping out in front of thousands of thugs and slavers, fighting for her life with the crudest weapons, all for Ralqual's profit. Pit fighting wasn't even the Quarren crime lord's primary money-maker; he did this for fun.

"It was nice to meet you, Chacko." She turned and walked across the hall, her door squeaking shut behind her.

I turned the hydrospanner over in my hands. Looking down at it, the thought occurred to me that gladiators weren't permitted to carry weapons outside the pits. Had she killed the other gladiator in my room with her bare hands? I shuddered.

--------

There was work to do at the garage the next day, but curiosity drew me to the pits. It was easy to find which one Astred was fighting in; Ralqual always gave her the biggest arena. If its high walls weren't easy enough to spot from across the city, the long lines gave it away. Sun-shriveled Weequay thugs stuffed slimy food into their mouths while they waited to be admitted. A Rodian slouched against the wall, reselling tickets. His partner was even selling death sticks right out in the open. Ralqual's goons didn't seem to notice; they were bulldozing their way through the already blood-thirsty crowd, breaking up fist fights.

I found a view screen along the outside wall and clustered around it with a few other people, probably slaves also, judging by the drab rags they wore. Only citizens were allowed into the seating area. The noon sun beat down on my neck while I waited for the match to start and I wished I hadn't left my canteen back at the garage. The last time I brought water with me into the city, mercs emptied my canteen and sent me to the slaves' sickbay with broken thumbs. I asked for a splint, but in New Morjanssik, spice is used to 'treat' almost everything. The thumbs set my work back nearly a month.

The view screen flashed as the match began. There was an announcer, but he didn't bother identifying Astred – she simply walked out of the bullpen, a vibrosword in her hand. The gate rattled shut behind her. She pulled a mask with a glowing T-shaped visor down over her face. I didn't understand how she could see out of it well enough to fight.

Her opponent swaggered out of the opposite pen. The Geonosian held a blaster pistol in each hand. The slaves around me hissed, but I didn't know what I was supposed to gather from his weapon choice or his species. I had never seen a termite-man duel before, but I rarely came here and there was a first time for everything.

Blaster bolts flew. Astred's vibrosword reflected such bright arcs of light that it appeared to glow. Dust puffed up around her feet as she ran in a straight line to her Geonosian opponent. After fifteen minutes of what seemed to be stalling on Astred's part, she swung her sword like a club down onto her opponent's neck. The insect-like head jerked back, dangling by cords of some kind of anatomy I pitied but didn't understand. With a second clubbing motion, the head flew off, hit the pit wall and slid to the ground. Astred raised her arms in victory.

I hurried back to my garage. Once inside the cool solitude, I pulled down the heavy bay door and got to work. Betsy heard me rummaging around and lurched out of the back room. "Hello, Father," she chirped.

Her mechanical approximation of human voice patterns always struck me as singsong. I smiled, despite my mood. I knew it was a mistake to go to the pits. Hadn't I already known enough about Astred's track record? "Hi, Betsy. How are you feeling today?"

"Hungry." Her pink photoreceptors intensified.

I pulled a repair kit out of my workbench's top drawer and tossed it to her. She caught it with an ease that reminded me what kind of droid she was. Administering the repair kit to herself, she ignored me for awhile and I wheeled out one of my works in progress. It was a scorched scout droid that belonged to a local bounty hunter. I told him it would be more expensive to repair the damage than it would be to just build him a new one, but he grabbed my lapels, yanked me halfway over the counter and said he wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. So here I was, transplanting roasted circuits filament by filament.

An armored glove banged on the garage door, sending Betsy hurrying in her own disjointed way towards the corner. I opened the door remotely when she deactivated herself.

Bright, unwelcome light flooded into the garage, along with a cantina's worth of sand. I hated desert wind. I stepped out from behind the counter and sent a maintenance droid to start cleaning up the debris. When I saw who came in through the door, I missed a step. "Astred!"

The fire-haired woman pulled a dark cloak off her shoulders and folded it up under one arm. "You had better close the door," she said. "It looks like a sandstorm is coming."

I pulled the door down manually. The garage was silent again, except for the occasional _beeps_ and _boops_ of the enthusiastic maintenance droid. He had already finished cleaning up the sand and was trying to get my attention.

Astred put her hands on her hips and swept her gaze over the room. Her scrutiny made me aware of the place where I'd spent countless years hunched over a workbench. White tube lights ran across the low ceiling. Droids lined the walls – mostly maintenance droids, with a few scouts and the occasional medical – while spare parts, tools, and schematics littered every surface in sight except the reflective steel floor. Astred walked through the garage, eyeing each individual droid and reading most of their designation aloud. When the occasional droid responded in binary, Astred understood and made small talk with it. For a few minutes I wondered if she was actually going to buy something.

Finally, she reached the counter at the back of the room and I walked around the other side of it.

"Your shop is very impressive," she said. When she smiled, I noticed how soft her mouth looked. Then I remembered her brutality in the pits earlier in the day: the clubbing, the _hacking_ with the blunt vibrosword, the frail insect-creature being torn apart while the crowd cheered and drank and attacked one another. I gripped the edge of the counter.

Astred frowned. "You're afraid of me."

"No, I'm not," I lied halfheartedly.

She rested her hands atop the counter and intertwined her fingers. "You saw my duel today."

I looked down at the singed little scout droid lying before me on the counter. It suddenly looked like a victim itself. It hadn't been equipped with any weaponry, and its chassis wasn't designed to deflect blaster fire. Its idiot master had sent it into a place where it wasn't supposed to be. Who would take a shot at a little scout droid? I pressed my lips together, pushing down a bubbling sense of outrage. I raised my eyes. "How could you do it?"

She reached out to put her hand on mine. Without knowing what I was doing, I jerked it away, then put it back. Her gloved hand had a human warmth; it surprised me. "This is what I do," she said. "There is no how or why. I train in the training pits. I fight in the fighting pits." She looked over at the deactivated Betsy. "B-3TC," she read aloud. "A combat designation. Are slaves allowed to keep battle droids?"

My shoulders sagged. "Ralqual's goons don't believe she's a combat model. I told them she was a protocol droid. Please, Astred, don't tell anyone, or Ralqual will throw me into one of those awful pits of yours."

"You told them this B-3 was a protocol droid? And they believed you?" Astred said. She studied my expression and knew I wasn't joking. She burst into laughter.

I walked out from behind the counter. "You could tell a Gamorrean that an HK unit was an intelligent vacuum cleaner and he'd believe you." When I activated Betsy, her pink photoreceptors lit up. "Hello, Father," she chirped.

Astred laid a hand on Betsy's chassis and smiled. "I love droids. So loyal."

"Thank you," Betsy replied. "I am designated Betsy."

Astred laughed. "I am designated Astred. I am a combat unit, like yourself."

Betsy's photoreceptors brightened.

"What's a battle droid doing with a sentient interaction package, Chacko?" Astred asked, peering at Betsy, who had blasters for hands.

My back straightened with pride, though I was still nearly a full head shorter than both Astred and Betsy. "It's not a package."

Betsy lurched over to the workbench and opened the top drawer. She pulled out a repair kit. "Are you hungry?" she asked Astred, photoreceptors flashing.

Astred grinned with childish delight. She looked at me and said, "Remarkable. She's beautiful, Chacko. You must be very proud."

I shrugged.

"Did you build her?" Astred asked me.

"No. A customer brought her to me years ago for maintenance. He died while Betsy was in my shop, and no one came to claim her," I replied. "I had her help me around the shop and I didn't give her any memory wipes. I don't believe in them."

Astred stared at Betsy again. "It's miraculous to find this level of intelligence in a fourth-degree droid. All you did was neglect her memory wipes?"

Betsy milled around the garage, picking up tools and putting them down. There didn't appear to be any real purpose to what she was doing. Astred added, "Look. Betsy's _imitating_ what you do here – like a child might imitate a parent at work."

"How does a lifelong pit fighter become so familiar with droids?" I couldn't stop myself from asking.

"I've traveled a lot," Astred said.

She expected me to buy that? "I saw you carrying on a conversation with my astromech. You learned binary just to catch a few shuttles? I find that hard to believe," I said, crossing my arms.

"For someone who spends most of his time with droids, you're very curious about human beings," she said with a smile, and turned towards the door.

-------

By mid-morning the next day, Ralqual was dead.

I was holed up in my garage as usual. The damaged scout droid was coming along well, until I got him running and saw that some of his programming had been corrupted by the blast. I thought it was going to be a good day; tinkering with the programming meant I could study his intelligence, compare it to my other droids, maybe catalogue anything strange about him. Then I heard that armored fist banging on my door. As I stretched my arms and walked over to the remote door control, I felt relieved that Astred wasn't officially Ralqual's enforcer; just her knock was enough to intimidate me.

Bright light contaminated the garage, but thankfully, there was no sand this time. Astred's cloaked form moved under the half-raised door and she pulled back an enormous hood. "Chacko, I have a favor to ask of you."

I sent the door rattling shut. "What kind of favor?"

Astred swept her gaze around the garage. "Could you lend me a droid? One that can serve as a light source?"

"A light source?" I squinted at her. "Are you planning a trip to the spice mines?"

She nodded in a distracted sort of way, not looking directly at me. "There's been an accident that I need to investigate. Now."

Astred knew I was the major supplier and mechanic of the mining droids, though slaves made up the vast majority of the spice mining force. Droid part shipments are rare in New Morjanssik because slaving is a vital gear in the Exchange's business; the recent war with the Mandalorians displaced millions of people, and it doesn't take much effort to travel to a world like Nar Shaddaa and prey on refugees. As much as I thought droid miners were the future, my owners didn't agree. Cave-ins, overloads, and lethal gas plumes came up once every couple of weeks, filling every sickbay with maimed slaves. When the sickbays ran out of room for mercs or citizens, slaves were tossed to the fighting hounds. The Trandoshan slavers never failed to bring replacements.

"Anything else?" I asked. "I can send you off with a compact scout. Some of them have some medical programming, a few have rudimentary drills."

"Yes, yes," she said, still not looking at me. She looked as though she were trying to visualize something and didn't want to be distracted. "That sounds fine. I mostly just need light."

I went to retrieve one of my spare scout droids and glanced at the clock. "Don't you have a match at noon?"

"My match is off. Ralqual has been murdered."

My jaw dropped. "Ralqual? _What?_ When?"

Astred pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. "On a routine visit to his spice mines. An accident, I've been told, but it smells like murder. I want to see for myself."

I knew better than to celebrate the local crime lord's death. Another would have taken his place by the end of the day, one probably more vicious. That's how it always happened.

As though prompted by my thoughts, she asked, "When was the last time the district's leadership changed hands?" _Leadership_. She had an odd way of putting it.

"Years. Decades." I pulled the compact droid out from under the counter, instinctively hefting it like a melon, checking for rattles or anything else out of the ordinary.

"Which one? Is it years or is it decades?"

I handed the droid to her. "You aren't really a slave, are you?"

------

The garage door rattled again at sunset, just as I sent the maintenance droid to do its last sweep. All but one of the light tubes were shut down when I lifted the door and let Astred back in.

Her dark cloak was pulled tightly around her. A sliver of her nose was the only thing visible beneath the deep pocket of her hood. Without a word, she reached into her cloak and handed me back my scout droid: in perfect condition and not so much as a grain of sand.

I took the droid with a smile of thanks and was about to turn to put it away when a slice of white light fell through the gap in her cloak. A flash of red grabbed my eye. Taking another look, I saw that a red sheen slicked her durasteel suit from her neckguard to her kneecaps. My grip grew tighter on the droid. I wanted to take a step back – it seemed the sensible thing to do – but my body wouldn't respond. A feeble wheezing sound escaped my throat.

"With your permission, I will be back tomorrow for the droid," she said. "Good night, Chacko." And she left.

The next morning, I programmed one of my protocol droids to give Astred the same scout. I went into my back workroom when she came knocking and pretended I was too busy to answer the door. I _was_ busy, anyway; there really had been some kind of accident out at the spice mines. Ralqual's underlings, who still had quite a bit of work to do even in their master's absence, needed a number of new maintenance droids built to go down into the shafts. Whatever happened out there had put them back significantly enough that they threatened me with the pit if I didn't finish the droids by a certain deadline.

Astred caught me, however. I was leaving the garage that night. I had stayed later than I should have; the streets sounded rowdier than usual. Just as I pulled the garage door shut behind me and punched in the lock code, Astred put her armored hand on my arm. I jumped.

"Your droid," she said, offering it to me, once again in pristine shape. No carbon scoring, buzzing photoreceptors, or smoke. I would have kissed her if she were a bounty hunter. But this woman was something much worse than that.

"Thank you," I said woodenly.

Astred stepped away from me. "Let me walk you back to the compound," she said.

"Thanks, but I'll manage," I said. I started moving. It wasn't a long walk. Normally, I sprinted, but I resisted the urge while she could still see me.

Astred fell into step beside me. "The streets are worse than they used to be, Chacko. You must be careful. Ralqual's enforcers are falling out of line. It's taking longer than anyone expected for the power vacuum in this district to be filled."

_You must be careful_. Paternalism. It wasn't something I was used to. Annoyed, I stopped and turned to face her. "It doesn't matter which Exchange thug controls one district or another. We're slaves. We were slaves when the Quarren before Ralqual cracked the whip and we'll be slaves when the Quarrens move out of this gods-forsaken pit and the Hutts or the Mandalorians or other humans take their place." I resumed walking at a faster pace.

She didn't say anything, so I opened my mouth again. "Did Ralqual pay you some kind of insurance fee, so that if he was killed, you'd find out who did it?" I stopped to turn and face her. "That's what you're using my droid for, isn't it? To solve the murder of a slave master."

"Chacko," she said softly, her face mostly hidden in the shadow of her cowl, "I'm a slave, like you. I don't get paid anything for my work."

"Your _work!_ Is that how you really think of it, Astred? Without needing any reason at all, you kill whomever you're told to! Work is something that makes life easier for other people, it's something constructive. That isn't what you do!"

Astred looked at me. Her steady gaze somehow made me aware that I was shouting. I glanced around, more embarrassed of my outburst than out of alarm that I would attract attention. The town was quiet, deserted. The chirping of crickets punctuated the awkward silence.

Then she spread her hands and said, "I was a soldier. Killing has been my livelihood for a long time." _And I don't expect that to change anytime soon,_ her blank expression told me. Her dogged pursuit of her master's murderer struck me as pitiful; no one else cared that Ralqual was dead. He had owned us. I even felt, ashamedly, in the back of my mind, that the old squid got what he deserved. I guess Astred didn't feel the same way, somehow.

"Have you found out who killed Ralqual?" I asked her.

"Yes, Chacko."

I sighed. It was probably a slave, a young one who'd never been owned before and thought that killing his master would make him a free man. "I guess you're going to kill him when you find him, aren't you?"

The corners of her mouth turned up in the saddest smile I had ever seen.

She followed at just a few steps behind me in silence until we were close to the compound gates. It was fully dark, and I was afraid. The stars shuddered far away in their gassy envelopes, the constellations cranked overhead like huge, inexorable gears, and the merciless sun bided its time on the far side of the planet, preparing for another long day of scorching and baking and rotting the land. I looked up into the empty places between the pinpoints of light, allowing myself a moment of homesickness. My birth-planet was out there. Hell, _other places_ were out there. Places where years had meaning and didn't run into one another like rivers converging on one great expanse of sameness....

Rivers.

I blinked when footsteps thudded in the sand off to my left. Astred heard them too, and turned to face them. She stepped up beside me.

It was a pack of Trandoshans: tall reptilian creatures with large, dark, blinking eyes. Each held a shock stick in his hand, flashing painfully in the primitive dark.

"Two of Ralqual's slaves," hissed one of them. I understood T'doshok; it was the slaving language.

Another one of them sneered. "Or _were_ two of Ralqual's slaves. The old squid is dead. These don't belong to anyone, now."

I froze, looking around the area for an escape route. We were out in the open but the Trandoshans blocked our way to the compound. A couple of rusty speedbikes littered the ground around us, making it difficult to take off in any sort of a straightshot. My skin prickled under my rags.

"You don't want to do this." Astred stepped in between them and me. I looked at her in horror – we were caught, but we didn't have to die.

The Trandoshans laughed. "The Exchange will pay us well to redistribute Ralqual's assets," one of them said, and started to move towards Astred.

Astred bent down and grabbed the nearest speedbike. With a grunt, she wrapped her fingers around one of the meter-long steel sidebars and yanked it clean out of its frame.

She swung the steel bar around as she stood up and smashed it into the first Trandoshan's head, sending a spray of meat, bone, and scale into the air. A scrap of scaly flesh slapped against my forehead. I screamed and flung it off.

Not stopping with the first one, Astred lunged forward and clubbed a second slaver's skull with the bar. The first blow knocked him to his knees. He cried out, lifted his arms over his head. Astred swung the bar around with another grunt and cracked the top of his spine. His head hung limply, obscenely, like a rag doll, until he toppled over into the sand.

A slaver grabbed me, and then a sickening, warm pain spread through my forehead. The stars wheeled in the sky. I blacked out with the sound of someone else's screaming in my ears.

A cool breeze swept across my face.

I opened my eyes to see an oil lamp, of all things. It sat on a low table in the center of the room and gave off a low, warm light that was familiar to me somehow. Astred sat on a couch on the other side of the table. Her armor suit was draped over the tabletop and she was cleaning it with a rag.

I looked over to where the breeze was coming from; a large window stood open, showing a glimpse of the starry night sky. Dunes rolled away from the compound in the starlight.

Pushing myself up onto my elbows, I saw that I lay on what must have been Astred's straw pallet. I winced and touched my temple. A bandage was wrapped around my head. Suddenly the struggle with the Trandoshans came back to me and I winced again. "Thank you for saving me," I said, my voice weak.

Astred looked up from her work. Her fire-red ringlets were pinned up, as always, and her gray eyes regarded me. She was dressed in her suit liner. "I'm glad to see that you've recovered, Chacko. A slaver smacked you in the head with his stun stick." Her armor drew her attention back; she was rubbing caked blood off the durasteel plating.

"What happened to the Trandoshans?" I asked, hoping that some of them begged for their lives and were allowed to go away.

She worked at a spot on her legplate. "I had to kill them all."

_Did you really?_ I thought, knowing better than to voice the question. Astred glanced over at me as if she had read my mind.

I turned onto my side. Astred's armor locker stood in the corner with its door open. It looked empty, but something caught my eye: a small, metallic plus-sign dangling from a fine chain. The golden lamplight caught it as it slowly turned. "What's that?" I asked.

"Nothing," she said, scrubbing away at her breastplate.

I pushed myself out of bed and walked over to the locker, pressing a hand to the side of my head. I saw my scout droid sitting on the floor beside the locker; I must have dropped him when I was knocked out, and Astred had the presence of mind to retrieve him. The little droid _booped_ and _beeped_ as I flicked him on.

With my free hand, I reached out and grazed my finger against the thing hanging in Astred's locker. She made no protest from over my shoulder as she worked away on her armor. The thing looked thick and heavy up close. It was surprisingly warm to the touch. I had my scout droid run a scan on it.

"What do you think?" I asked the little guy.

He gave me a brief readout on his side panel display. Blinking, I gazed up at the metallic object. My mouth must have been hanging open, because Astred spoke up from behind me. "It's durasteel."

I laughed. After shutting down the droid, I turned around and walked back to the straw pallet. I sat down, holding my head. "You own a Hero's Cross."

"Yes." Scrub, scrub, scrub. "I do."

I jumped up and started to pace. "My gods! Then you must have fought for the Republic in the Mandalorian Wars. You already told me you were a soldier, but –"

"What, Chacko?" she said, fixing me with an odd stare. "You thought I was a Mandalorian?" Her hands paused in their work.

My legs felt cold and tingly. "Um – no. But other people did. Arena-goers all thought you wouldn't fight Mandalorians because you were one of them."

"Yes, I was a Republic officer. I fought in the Mandalorian Wars." She resumed rubbing grit and dried blood out of her armor. "But none of that matters now."

"What are you talking about?" I said, throwing up my hands. "Only a handful of those medals get awarded. They're given by the Supreme Chancellor himself!"

She stood up. Lamplight glinted off the suit's durasteel plating. She scrutinized it in the light. Then she walked over to the locker and hung the suit up, covering her Hero's Cross. "Go back to sleep," she said.

Not wanting to push her, I lay down on the straw pallet and looked up at the ceiling. Wind howled across the dunes outside, billowing the tattered drapes. I thought about the readout my scout droid gave me; the Hero's Cross was usually given to Republic soldiers who suffered terrible injuries without dropping out of the service. But Astred looked in the peak of health, having displayed an almost cybernetic strength when she defended me from the slavers. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as she locked away her armor suit and walked over to the window. I expected her to shut it, but she just stood there, staring out at the windswept dunes that spread one after another into oblivion.

Astred was already armored when I opened my eyes in the morning. As I got up and stretched my arms, I noticed that her armor had managed to get dingy, sandy, and a little bloody even though it had been lying in the locker since she cleaned it. She stood by the window, gazing out at what looked to me like nothing in particular, as if she hadn't moved all night.

"What are you looking for?" I asked, collecting my droid.

She didn't respond. It could have been my imagination, but it seemed as though ever since the duels stopped, she had become quieter, more withdrawn.

Then she turned around. "I checked out your wound before you woke up, Chacko. It's almost completely better. Do you feel safe getting back to the garage on your own?"

I flicked on the droid and typed in a couple of commands. The droid buzzed a moment before giving me readouts. "Are you going somewhere?" I asked.

"Just over to the adjoining building for a minute." Her hand wandered to her belt and clutched at empty air. She glanced down as if she expected something to be there.

I cleared my throat. "There are just slave quarters over there."

"I know," she said, her shoulders sagging. She walked over to the door and opened it. There was a spray of sand in her fiery hair. When the hard morning light struck it, her curls looked like bunches of desert flowers that bloomed once a year, after the sulfer rainstorms.

We stepped out into the corridor, standing in the exact spot where we met. I looked down each direction of the hall; Gamorrean guards had resumed their patrols. Someone must have taken Ralqual's place over the past couple of days. "You're welcome to stop by the garage this afternoon," I said. "Betsy will be hoping to see you."

A smile broke through the mask of resolve on her face. "Betsy," she said. "Yes, I think I will come by." She put her hand on my shoulder. "Thank you." She turned and walked down the corridor, disappearing down a stairwell.

I waited until her footsteps echoed distantly. Then I followed her.

Astred turned up standing in the doorway of a Twi'lek slave's room. It was a dingy, interior room, just like mine. Shoeless slaves don't make loud foosteps, so Astred didn't hear me coming – but when I padded softly down the corridor to reach her, the Twi'lek slave girl let out a blood-chilling scream.

I broke into a run and stopped at the doorway of the room. Astred held the girl by the throat against the wall, though the girl looked like she was still alive.

"Do you know who I am?" Astred said.

The Twi'lek girl nodded, her eyes wide.

"Then you know why I'm here."

I walked into the room. My palms sweated more than when Ralqual's goons came knocking on my door and I hadn't finished their work order. I was sure they were planning to throw me to the pits; now I was facing the pit monster herself. "General!" I said. "Stop it!"

To my surprise, Astred dropped the slave, who scurried into a corner and massaged her throat. Astred looked over at me and blinked.

I took a step forward. "I know who you are. My scout droid was used in the war with the Mandalorians. This morning, I looked up the roster of Republic soldiers who were given the Hero's Cross. Only one of them was a woman."

She looked at me silently. The whimpering girl in the corner made a move to leave, and Astred shot her a look. The girl froze.

"The Jedi general from the wars would never kill a helpless slave," I said. My voice shook.

"You don't know what that Jedi general was capable of, Chacko," she said, the full weight of her gaze settling on me. Her grey eyes looked dense as durasteel ball bearings. "Killing a slave would be the mildest of the unpleasant acts I've committed." She looked at the slave girl in the corner. "Slave or not, she's a murderer."

"You don't have to kill her, Astred!"

"I have to do justice!" she shouted at me. Her voice forced me back a step. The slave girl winced even though Astred was ignoring her.

I waved an arm towards the girl in the corner. "Did you even ask her why she did it?"

"The only thing that matters is that she killed my master," Astred said, following my gaze to the girl, who crossed her arms over her head and shrunk away from us.

I tried to speak with conviction, but my voice came out as a hoarse whisper. "Was Ralqual really your master, Astred?"

She looked at me, then, understanding my meaning. Astred served a Jedi master once. I don't know who that master was, but I got the feeling that he wouldn't have wanted her to kill a helpless slave girl out of some twisted sense of duty.

"This is what I am, Chacko. I was bred to fight, to kill. Ralqual knew that. He appreciated me."

I threw up my hands. "Gods, Astred, you're not a kath hound! You're not a droid!" I'd seen Betsy assert more independence than this. What would it take for a decorated Jedi general to believe that pit fighting for a crime lord on a backwater world was the same thing as soldiering?

All three of us were like statues for a few long moments: the slave girl and I were afraid to move, while Astred stood there, looking down at her curled-up fingers as morning sunlight flickered against the hard grey surfaces of her eyes.

Finally, swallowing back the tightness in my throat, I took a step forward and spread my hands. Her medal lay in my palm, glistening with sweat. I wasn't sure why I picked the lock and took it when her back was turned; I just felt like if I didn't, she would leave it behind. She would forget it. Hell, she had already forgotten it. "Someone thought you were a hero," I said.

She stared down at the medal in my hands with an uncomprehending gaze, as though interpreting an alien artifact. When she met my gaze again, her eyes were wet. The blue-green in her irises came out then, like the shimmering colors of a dune beetle's carapace.

"I'm so tired," she said, holding her ribs. I had read in her service record, provided by the droid, that she had lost a lung and two ribs in a vibroblade duel when her ship was commandeered by the Mandalorians. She had received top-of-the-line reconstruction, but I guess cybernetic and durasteel prosthetics just weren't the same. It seemed ironic for a Jedi to be carrying around all that artificial stuff inside her. But I didn't know a thing about Jedi. I'd never met one before.

And I don't think I'll meet another of her kind again. Betsy asks about the 'fine durasteel combat unit Astred' from time to time. I never know what to tell her; part of me expects Astred to go to another world, fight as a duelist or maybe even as a mercenary, drifting from one job to the next like so many Mandalorians who were displaced by the same war. But maybe she decided to go back to the Republic and fight for something worthy again, like her eyes and her voice and her posture always seemed to demand. I couldn't know.

But I could hope it was the latter.

13


End file.
